Player speaks out to Dev's

[Adam-Savage]

Found this interesting post on the blue tracker.

There are two main points here for the TL;DR crowd
a - the ‘this needs to be harder’ attitude is disrespectful
b - you’re fixing something that wasn’t broken

Fights (raids and dungeons) are disrespectful of the majority of players i know (my guild right now has roughly 130 accounts in it, with several hundred more friends/former raid allies etc that i come into contact with. Their feelings are nearly the same as mine on this).
1 - risk vs reward is broken in heroics - after a week, you’re just farming Valor Points. This is boring. No-one likes a boring game.
2 - too many instances start with a boss of disproportionate difficulty / ridiculous random factor that makes pugging/raiding that instance more trouble than it’s worth.
2a - examples - Corborous in Stonecore, Halfus Randombreaker in BOT.
2b - If it’s more trouble than its worth, then the money to develop the content is wasted. Wasted money by your dev team is bad. It is better from a money standpoint, for US AND YOU, for the content to be taken in by everyone (even if it is easier) than for it to be taken in by only a few people.
3 - All of the rep runs, VP runs, trash farming means one thing - return of the grind. WOW promised to reduce the grind. WOW, when it launched, basically prided itself on being less grindy than its spiritual predecessor, Everquest. I Left everquest because of the disrespectful amount of grind. 200 players followed me to WOW because of this (yes, i brought you 200 customers between launch and BC). They followed me because we had a good time together and i knew when to say ‘enough’.

I’m very close to saying ‘enough’ with wow. You need to re-examine what you’re doing.

Blizzard’s attitude is disrespectful
1 - Ghostcrawler’s intensly insulting ‘dungeons are hard’ post
1a - we don’t deserve to be talked down to. you sounded like a d*ck
1b - you need to make the content fun before you make it ridiculously challenging. We’re doing this for FUN. You hit the fun channel pretty firmly in Lich King. Not sure why you abandoned this model. Was it that you listened to a ridiculous minority that didn’t like it ‘too easy’? This is silly. Easy is relative and it is an opinion. Usually it is an opinion applied after you’ve done something difficult, not before.
1c - instead of talking down to us - fix the content. bring the content to us, not vice-versa. we’re paying for this. do what we want, not what you think we should want.
2 - the departure of the old dev team should not have heralded a completely new vision, especially considering that they built a game with 11 million players.
2a - we are invested in their game, deliver us more of that. Don’t sit there and arrogantly think you know better. I’m willing to bet that given how angry my guildmates and friends are that you don’t know better.
2b - new devs are custodians of the plan-as-in-place, not purveyors of a paradigm shift

There aren’t just two ‘skill levels’ or ‘interest groups’ of players
1 - there are casual raiders, not just casual players. There are degrees of players between ‘totally casual’ and ‘hardcore raiders’ You have a duty as persons providing a service to provide an experience that caters to these players. Lich king and Burning Crusade did this. Currently, Cataclysm is not. This is messed up. We’re left to wait until VP gear becomes JP gear to gear up to do content as ‘older content’? This goes back to my disrespectful of the player comment above.
2 - there are semi hardcore raiders who deserve a challenge, but can’t invest 6 hrs straight to learn a fight.
3 - some very good players are friends with not-so-good players. they deserve to bring their friends along. You have ended this for now and that’s bull*!*#. You say ‘bring the player not the class.’well what if that player is a friend of 22 yrs who doesn’t have the time to grind 30 hrs a week on reputation. Should i leave them behind? Don’t be a jerk and tell me yes. Again, that's a messed up, disrespectful attitude.
4 - In lich king, the ‘heroic’ difficulty on raids was a good separator for the ‘elite’ players. Why was this abandoned and everything made more difficult? To slow progression down? The pace of content release in LK was almost perfect. Why are you fixing something that wasn’t broken.
5 - the nerf to healing, when the change to grind and gear is taken into account, is usurious. You have taken an already difficult (mentally and skillwise) class and made it completely unfun.

The proof
1 - long queue times for DPS (they've gone from 15 minutes to 40 minutes) in instances means fewer people are willing to risk their time tanking and healing for heroics
2 - healers are not taking risks with groups and very fast to bail on groups that are hard to heal. The lack of surplus mana/mana regen means that they aren’t willing to risk their time because too many X factors are weighing down on their mana management. You have made it so it’s harder for marginal players to even get a chance at getting better.
3 - the game itself lacks feedback and the sheer volume of numbercrunching needed to learn the endgame is daunting (especially as a DPS player). Making the non-heroic raids a bit easier is not a bad call - it isn’t coddling the ‘carebears’ - it’s just accepting that not everyone is willing to make wow their job.

I think it was one of your old Devs (someone who's now on your 'Titan' project) who said in regard to problems in Everquest 'Fix This' - how about you fix this. We want our fun back.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/1543 ... er-read-me

[Kalliope]

Kind of unfair to only post what the player said.

I appreciate the time you took to lay out your critique of the current expansion, as well as your experiences with World of Warcraft over the past six years.

One thing needs to be made perfectly clear though if we're to maintain a real dialog with the players who spend their time providing feedback on the forums. You cannot justify violating the forum Code of Conduct and Posting Guidelines because you're very passionate about gameplay, frustrated by our development philosophy in Cataclysm, or insulted by the way we've tried to communicate that philosophy to you.

You don't react to someone you feel is being insultingly dismissive, stubborn, or whatever else some players felt after reading Ghostcrawler's blog, by retorting with literal insults via masked profanity.

I challenge everyone reading this who feels similarly to the original poster to help steer this community toward better civil discourse. Don't respond to trolls insulting you. Report them. If you want to vent, be reasonable about expressing why you're frustrated, rather than choosing an inflammatory tone. Vote up the posts you feel have reasonable, well-stated feedback, even if you don't agree with their viewpoints. Vote down the posts that aren't going to lead to anything more than impulsive ranting, finger-pointing, and insults. (Carrying this type of mentality into the game goes a long way as well if you aren't satisfied with some of the behavior around you.)

Most importantly, don't make things so personal. Ghostcrawler doesn't have disdain for you. He wants what is best for the game and this community, and we report to him what players are saying on the forums every single day. He's playing the game just like everyone else in the community constantly, using the Dungeon Finder, fighting for Tol Barad, raiding, etc. He's been in failed pick-up groups, he's been in partial guild runs where he was kicked just because another guildmate came online, and he's been in runs with three fellow guildmates where the fifth player left out of fear of being kicked further in.

He experiences the full gamut of World of Warcraft gameplay on the same level the majority of the playerbase does, even while working more than 40 hours a week, spending time with family and friends, and pursuing other hobbies. And as community managers, we have in-depth discussions in person with him and other lead developers every week about our experiences, and the experiences reported to us by you on the forums.

The simplest thing to remember about people who develop video games, is that they want to make a really fun, epic game. That is the driving factor above money or anything else. The simplest thing to remember about community managers, is that we act as conduits between the developers and the community. That doesn't stop at reading the forums and sending them what we're seeing. We're always paying attention to what people are doing and how people are acting when we're playing among you.

So, if you come here with those things in mind, it'll probably be much easier for us to have a focused discussion about what you do and don't like about the game.

We're done hearing about how you feel what Ghostcrawler said was mean. Look at the information and philosophies he's provided and challenge those if you feel we're still not heading in the right direction, even with the changes coming in patch 4.0.6. Then, we can start discussing how patch 4.1 should look.

That's the main blue response.

[Lisaara]

Well, sadly, I kinda agree with the Player poster. The cata dungeon grind is just no fun at all....infact, a casual player like myself doesnt have the will to grind it anymore. I don't mind a little challenge but I think they went a bit overboard.

That said, i should go to bed. I can't think too clearly atm. Lol.

[Saturo]

Whinepost I say. Seems all they want is to bring back the easymode WOTLK. The problem isn't with difficult dungeons, it's with bad players IN the difficult dungeons. Me no like. I will agree thaz the repgrind is horrible though, you get roughly 200 rep and then you wipe and everyone leaves.

[Kalliope]

Whinepost I say. Seems all they want is to bring back the easymode WOTLK. The problem isn't with difficult dungeons, it's with bad players IN the difficult dungeons. Me no like.

This was my take on it as well. It's possible to avoid a lot of the crappiness with the system if you have friends who know how to play, but if you don't, it'll suck.

[Saturo]

When I run with my guild we have quick, easy runs without wipes. The dungeons aren't hard, it's people making them hard.

''RAWR! I ARE HEALER! I PUNCH SHEEP WITH LIGHTNING! RAWR!''

[Adam-Savage]

Heroics are not that bad. It's easier now because we are better geared. I did a heroic earlier today with 2 other guild members. One of them was our healer. He was very clear from the word go. If you act stupid and don't do what your supposed to do then he will stop healing you. Needless say it went very smooth. Everyone did what they where supposed to do.

[Lisaara]

Sadly, people on the Emberstorm Battlegroup arent the brightest crayons in the box.

[Adam-Savage]

Sadly, people on the Emberstorm Battlegroup arent the brightest crayons in the box.

They would of hopefully learned with my guild's healer. He would of let em die. They would of quickly realized to pay attention to what there supposed to do. Raid awareness goes a long way to. If you don't have that then you need to re learn the game.

Didn't you say you where going to bed ?

[Mozag]

They would of hopefully learned with my guild's healer. He would of let em die. They would of quickly realized to pay attention to what there supposed to do. Raid awareness goes a long way to. If you don't have that then you need to re learn the game.

Sadly, this is not always the case. My husband can be a real jerk as a healer when he's in a bad mood, and will most definitely not heal people who mess up continuously, even after being explained to carefully what is going wrong and how the situation can be bettered. Usually the dps will buck up and do their best, but the problem is the tanks, and you can't really stop healing the tank, because that punishes the whole group. His guild doesn't have a lot of heroic geared tanks yet, and so he usually has to PuG it, and though I have far more patience than him, I'm inclined to feel his pain when I look over his shoulder at some of the antics he has to try and heal through. I really don't understand why the letters "MB" seem to make tanks run all the faster towards their new target...

[Lisaara]

Sadly, people on the Emberstorm Battlegroup arent the brightest crayons in the box.

They would of hopefully learned with my guild's healer. He would of let em die. They would of quickly realized to pay attention to what there supposed to do. Raid awareness goes a long way to. If you don't have that then you need to re learn the game.

Didn't you say you where going to bed ?

I did say I should....didnt say when....XD

[TygerDarkstorm]

I agree with Saturo and Kalliope on this. All I really got out of that post was "bring back WotLK" style playing, which, to me, wasn't all that fun. Rounding up everything in a dungeon and AoEing it down just really got mindless after a while, especially on a druid healer. Everything just got too easy, in my opinion.

[Adam-Savage]

I remember people dying or almost dying because the healer was watching tv during the run.

[Sonata]

Whiny post is really whiny.

The thing that mostly nags my head is that this player is saying that Healers won't dare to make a risk.
Everybody in the group has to take a risk when pugging.
If anybody in the group is new there is always a risk involved, this also is the same with players who might have done it a couple of times can produce a certain risk.
Few examples, a brand new tank means there might be aggro issues, new healer there might be alot of over healing and OOM situations, new dps might mean that they don't know the fight or the dungeon and won't ask.

And a healer saying that "Don't make mistakes or I will not heal you" ain't nice, what if there is a fear pull, a pat or even a BAD pull? I know that healers these days need to make tough choices, but letting somebody die because of a accident pull is just plain mean unless it's called for.
The dps classes like a mage and a hunter can still use CC even in combat, there are ways to make the battle easier even while in combat. But it is hard since in pugs there is no way to communicate between people in a really fast way thus this leading in CC being broken.

But I'd rather not want WRATH to come around again. Now people actually need to use CC, think a bit before acting and need to learn that accidents happen.

[Loethlin]

The dungeons aren't hard, it's people making them hard.

Amen to that!
I thought they were a bit hard at the very start, when I did the dungeons for the very 1st time. I had to learn, yes? Now I think they're fine. Only complaint I might have is that they take a longer time to complete than WotLK dungeons, time I could spend doing something much more interesting.
The problem, in my opinion, are WotLK heroes, like the author of that whiny post! "What CC?!" "HEALLLLLL!!!!" "GIEF MOAR PURPLZ!" *facepalm* Those are what makes dungeons and raids hard now. And people, generally, don't want to learn new things. That's why noone did The Oculus and that's why they refuse to accept the fact that you need to think more in randoms now.
Because it's not about difficulity, it's about thinking. If you actually think what you are doing, even in quest greens you'll be able to do well. Better than a WotLK hero, anyway.

I have no issues with healers right now, but I do have with some tanks. Unfortuantely there are some that just plain suck. If a tank is at least a bit skilled and knows what to do, he'll tank the dungeons no problem, healer won't have to go OOM on him and everything will be fine. But I'm sorry, maybe I expect too much? That someone with such a vital role will take the time to find out how to tank specific bosses and sometimes use cooldowns? Is it too much to ask, even of a casual player?

I don't want WotLK: redoux. I just want people getting rid of the mindless gameplay they grew accustomed to.

I do have issues with rep grind, however. Dreary, time consuming task with rewards that are almost not worth it.

And I do have issues with the way devs treat the players. Sometimes. When they assume we're all like the OP. But mostly I don't give a flying ****. And why should I?

TL;DR: OP is a whiny carebear.

Oh, yeah. By OP I don't mean Adam, but the author of the post he quoted.

[Tudyk]

Personally, I just think there's not enough dungeons. But then again, I haven't gotten around to raiding on any of my chars yet so who knows. Difficulty-wise?

I usually run with a group of RL friends, so we communicate. Some of us have been playing since Vanilla, and one of us was new to the game in Wrath (she hit 80 like 2 weeks before Cata came out). My bro and his wife generally play 2/3 days a week, and are still working on getting the last couple of upgrades before they can do heroics ... so I can't really say for sure how they'll fare.

My little druid (just got the ilevel OK to start heroics 2 days ago) is happily tanking for people's alts, even though I haven't done a lot of the heroics before. Today we (my BF's barely-85-cheating-with-gear-in-my-bags ~7k DPS hunter and our relatively well-geared DK friend) ran two random heroics. The PuGs we picked up (paladin and mage) were both doing their first heroic. Even though I was the only one who'd run heroic Tol'vir before and had never tanked it, it went off without a hitch. We decided to press our luck with the group, and got HoO next. We had a couple deaths (mostly due to things just being MEAN to the DK), but despite a number of botched pulls on my part, no wipes and a full clear.

I know we got dungeons that didn't have insta-fail-for-standing-in-shit options, but if people with absolutely no heroic experience and the bare minimum of gear can already pretty easily clear these dungeons in somewhere around an hour ... what's left but farming badges to make them a little easier?


EDIT: re: the quoted post instead of just me ranting:
Are raids really that much harder than heroic dungeons, or is the OP complaining about heroics being too hard? The "out with the grind" part of his argument I certainly agree with, anyways.

My hunter's in mostly 346 and is currently bored to tears (still waiting for two before we try any actual raiding). With TLPD and every rare I want out of the way, my playing her usually consists of doing my cooking/fishing/Therazane (ARGH why aren't those enchants BoA?!) dailies and mining to try and get the geode pet for bro's wife. The majority of my dungeon experience is now sitting in a queue for 45 mins just to have a tank call me a "f-ing moron" for not being able to solo a lever in heroic HoO despite the fact that I very clearly stated upon zoning in that I'd never done the dungeon before on heroic. And asked AGAIN before the boss if there was anything other than "things hurt more, really for REAL don't stand in them" for me to worry about. Of course my being a terrible baddy makes the tank quit, which causes the group to completely disband ... leaving me with another 45 minutes of flying around in circles mining to look forward to.

[Golden]

Whinepost I say. Seems all they want is to bring back the easymode WOTLK.

I have to disagree with you there. Is there nothing between the state the game is in now and Wrath?

Leveling a pure dps class without tank and healer friends is a pain, because you HAVE to take the 40 minute queue. I love my main and would like to play her more, do some heroics, finish those rep grinds, but having to wait for nearly an hour to get to a group that will promptly break before the first boss is NOT my definition of fun.

[Ana]

The problem as i see it, is that some randoms are utterly perfect grps, and other times u get into grps with ppl with a very full ego or no clue of what to do..

We were in sfk the otehr day, and the tank keep facing springvale towards the grp during the purple spray, we tried 7 times, and then the tank leaves saying that we are all noobs, the healer leaves cause his sick of dieing, and that leaves the dps to wait for another 45-50 min before we can get a new grp

to me the biggest problem is the wait time for dps... last nigth i waited 50 min, we entered the deepholm dungeon, the healer and tank desided that they didt wanna go tehre, so they left, and the grp went puff.. leaving me to wait another 50 min ... and u never know if u get lucky or not ;(

My healer doenst have that problem.. for her the wait is 10-15 min at max and i can live with that.. i just wish they would reduce the wait time for dps somehow

[Mearra]

-Sigh- Silly whineposts.

I admit I gritted my teeth when I first started healing the instances heroic. Particularly in pugs where tanks rushed in thinking everything should be facerolled as it was in Wrath, dps would pull ahead of the tank if he actually took the time to mark for CC, people would just rush at a boss without knowing a mechanic. People seem to forget that back in BC, CC was there,people would explain boss mechanics prior to pull if someone didn't know the fight. It wasn't just in classic where you had to have a bit of a clue to do instances. (Granted, once you were all geared up, you could generally faceroll a lot of things.) Interesting how much people forget....

At the beginning of Cata the players didn't know all the fights, they surely didn't have the gear and some were still trying to figure out all the new nifty tricks to their classes (since some took time off until Cata launch). Obviously, this would cause some issues. Personally I took time off my priestess and spent time on my huntress to find all the rares I'd been eyeing (which is how I started posting here). Now more people know the instances, have reacquainted themselves with their characters, have more gear - whether it be from instances or crafted (now that people have been able to level their professions). All of the above has made things smoother.

While going through instances with my alts I've noticed things are much simpler. Admittedly I often go in guild groups/partial guild groups, so of course those ones go quickly, but even in pugs most of my runs go fairly well. Yes I get the occasional bad group, or one idiot that needs to be delt with but....in general..it's not much different than pre-cata.

So all these people who are still QQing about the difficulty level may need to review what the common denominator is, or review how they do instances. If their problems usually relate to boss fights and issues with simple mechanics, there are addons that will very quickly explain a boss fight (or blare at you if you are standing in something you shouldn't), a click of a button and a drop down menu, VOILA. Now the party knows what is going to happen, no one should be clueless to what goes on.

I know I've rambled about all this before, I think even on the official forums under my priests name.....

To the "Mean Healer" aspect. It isn't mean if you do it with warning. I'm pretty sure most healers that say "Don't be stupid or I won't heal you" aren't refering to the accidental pulls, at least not for the most of them. If people die from those, it's usually just because the healer couldn't keep up. Though coming in and saying that off the bat...is a bit rude.
These healers are more refering to when a player is being a major problem in the party (breaking CC, standing in bad and avoidable things, pulling ahead of the tank while the healer is oom, etc etc etc)
Why should a healer blow all their mana and cooldowns because someone insists on consistently standing in a blitz charge? It makes no sense...If you've been told multiple times to stop doing something bad and you keep doing it, why should someone spend their time covering your butt? Remember, some people refuse to learn until they are faced with a consequence.

Mini vent over.....Back to original topic....

I like the challenge generally, I kind of missed the days of having to think while in a heroic. I am glad I get to trap again on my hunter, sap on my rogue, sheep on my mage etc etc. It lets me feel a bit more important when I'm dpsing rather than just hitting my rotation/priority over and over. I get to care about more cooldowns and use more abilities on my healers! I'm interested to see how my tanks are going to play out.=)

PS In regard to those who wondered about the raid content:
I've done the fights..yes they are harder (some are easier). But keep in mind a lot is a gearing issue and getting acquainted with the fights. Communication is key, which is something else people aren't very accustomed too. Once you learn how to really work as a team and get a bit of gear, things get much smoother

TL;DnR: Cata is fine, not much diff then BC needing to CC and learn fights. People should stop QQing and just work on improving. Wrath was easy and rep grinding always blew.

[Nightsights]

only part i agree with is the long 45min dps que.

claims to have played during vanilla and BC, calling the current 5man heroics and raids hard. the 5man dungeons will get easier as new tiers of raids come along. strat, scholo, lbrs, ubrs, definitely werent easy compared to the wotlk dungeons.

i was in full 346 gear at the start of the 3rd week after Cata launch. i only do the occasional guild run, even most of my pug 5 man heroics that i do now for the valor points are fairly quick and easy. if its like 3 mobs, the tank just aoe tanks, 4 or more then we cc 1 or 2. once T12 raids come out we'll be back to wotlk dungeons. well maybe not exactly, ie ret pallies tanking, or prot tanks grabbing 2-3 grps at once.

H corborus was a bit tough the first couple of weeks, easy one shot now. i felt all four H Grim Batol bosses were tough the first couple of weeks, easy now. every heroic 5man is easy now, even with pugs. was he talking about Halfus normal or heroic?? not that hard and the different drakes each week gives it a tiny bit of spice, its still basically the same mechanics with a small twist.

grinding has always been part of rpgs, and WoW. 900g for epic lvl 60 mount, that was challenging back then, its pocket change now. did he forget about the rep grind for your 4 capital cities, argent dawn, hydraxian warlords, zul gurub, cenarion hold, etc, etc. lol, the rep grind is easy now.